Eighteen year old Myla Lewis is a girl who loves two things: kicking ass and kicking ass. She’s not your every day quasi-demon, half-demon and half-human, girl. For the past five years, Myla has lived for the days she gets to fight in Purgatory’s arena. When souls want a trial by combat for their right to enter heaven or hell, they go up against her, and she hasn’t lost a battle yet.

But as she starts her senior year at Purgatory High, the arena fights aren’t enough to keep her spirits up anymore. When the demons start to act weird, even for demons, and the King of the Demons, Armageddon, shows up at Myla’s school, she knows that things are changing and it’s not looking good for the quasi-demons. Myla starts to question everything, and doesn’t like the answers she finds. What happened seventeen years ago that turned the quasi-demons into slave labor? Why was her mom always so sad? And why won’t anyone tell her who her father is? Things heat up when Myla meets Lincoln, the High Prince of the Thrax, a super sexy half-human and half-angel demon hunter. But what’s a quasi-demon girl to do when she falls for a demon hunter? It’s a good thing that Myla’s not afraid of breaking a few rules. With a love worth fighting for, Myla’s going to shake up Purgatory.

Monster House Books is celebrating the launch of the audiobook version of the best seller Angelbound, both on iTunes & Audible! As a result, every launched book in the series is only $1.99, aka more than 50% off…And that includes Angelbound ACCA, which was only released a few months ago!

Guest Post – Overcoming The Clichés of Angels, Demons & Hunters

My book, ANGELBOUND, tells the story of a part demon girl who falls in love with a part angel prince. If that weren’t awkward enough, our Prince also happens to be a demon hunter. If you aren’t familiar with the story, there’s a quick book trailer here. In any case, I’m doing an author tour to celebrate the launch of ANGELBOUND as an audiobook, and this representation of angels, demons and hunters isn’t totally mainstream, so I’ve been asked to share how I avoided the most common clichés of the genre.

It’s a super-interesting question.

As I thought about it, I realized that I never start building a world by saying “how can I avoid clichés?” Instead, it all starts by asking a question: “what would happen if?”

So you know, I got this trick from JRR Tolkien, who started world-building his books THE HOBBIT and later, LORD OF THE RINGS, by asking questions like: “what would have happened if the Anglo Saxons had horses and didn’t get over-run (quite literally) by the William the Conqueror?”

For ANGELBOUND, I asked the question: “What if in the after-life, they were pretty much as confused as we are here?” Since I was raised a Roman Catholic, I placed that question into an after-life filled with angels and demons. In this world, angels are more likely to be good, but they still have their not-so-great moments. The reverse is true of demons.

At the same time, I became really interested in the ideas of lust and wrath as sins, especially for girls. I realized that there are times when both emotions are completely appropriate, but we don’t really talk about that too much, especially when we’re teenagers…And that got me wanting to have a heroine who didn’t only have wrathful feelings against evil souls and demons, but she actually liked getting her wrath on and fighting the bad guys. In this scenario, she’s not really evil, so long as she has it under control. After that, the world building got super-interesting. I decided to highlight the question of “what’s good and evil” by pairing our heroine with a part-angel Prince who thought that anyone with a touch of demonic DNA must be wicked, through and through. ANGELBOUND was born.

Now, I know some authors who can work from the outside in—let’s take this genre and change this piece of it—but that doesn’t work for me. For me to craft a world, there has to be an underlying question or shift that I’m exploring. Otherwise, I end up writing the same page over and over!

Thanks so much for asking this question…I had a fun time answering it! In case you have other queries, I’m always up for reader interaction, and more information on how to contact me is listed below.

About the Author

Christina graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School with BA’s in English along with Television, Radio, and Film Production. An avowed girl geek, Christina loves creating immersive fantasy worlds with action, adventure, romance, and kick-ass female protagonists. She lives in Newton, MA with her husband, son, and golden retriever Ruby.